Zend Framework Chronicles Part I

Ladies and germs, this blog is going to take an extreme turn in the geek direction, which was, after all, it's original charter. Geeks will eat it up, but if you don't care for dorkage, I can actually be quite normal at times, and you should read some of my other posts by searching for non-geeky keywords. The decision has been finalized to rewrite the legacy style code of TixRUs to leverage the power of frameworks without forcing it into the rigid confines of a Content Management System (CMS) such as Drupal, that you then have to find modules for or program your own. The framework has been selected. And the winner is..... (drumrolllllllllllll)
ZEND FRAMEWORK Zend Framework seems to suit my needs. I considered CakePHP and Symfony, both strong contenders, and CodeIgniter, which some people love, and I had downloaded and played with a few homegrown ones as well. But the bottom line is Zend is backed by big bucks, it aint going away, the documentation is excellent, there are ways to make it integrate with Smarty, (which I am heavily invested in), it has a great deal of action, a large userbase, bla bla bla. Zend Framework is considered a heavyweight, and it has a learning curve. In my experience most things with learning curves tend to be worth it in the long run.

So today I installed it on my brand new virgin virtual server (that was a piece of cake, no wait, was it a piece of zend?) Anyway it was EASY. Then I went through
Mitchell Hashimoto's very nice video presentation and got the whole thing going, with a few curse words tossed the way of my stark unpadded webserver config file along the way.

I won't tell you where my new server lives for the time being, because I don't have the directory structure set up quite the way I want it yet. But in the next installment I should be making it a little bit more secure, and if you want to follow along with me and see a bare bones scaffolding start to look like a web app it might be interesting. I'll be tweeting about it as well.
That's it for today.